By Emily Griffin
OGDENSBURG, New York (WWNY) - Under several layers of dust in Ogdensburg city storage, an old cigar-rolling machine is resting after a busy life in the early 1900s. “I was looking at some statistics,” city historian Julie Madlin said, “and in 1900, there were 39 cigar makers.” It all started in the 1840s, when a fellow named Chauncey Clark moved here and wanted to make extra money selling cigars. “So, he opened a cigar shop and it did really well, so he started training other guys how to make cigars,” Madlin said, “and a lot of those guys opened their own shops later on.”
One of those apprentices was John Hannan, who went nationwide with his cigars. “The Hannan brothers exported a million in one year,” Madlin said, “so this wasn’t smalltime business, some were really doing really good business.” A single worker could roll out more than 200 cigars every day. “We became known for that,” Madlin said. “These cigars are being sold all over and, really, it’s an economic boon for the city. It’s a huge economic force here in the city.”
But why did cigar making get so big in Ogdensburg, where tobacco was never a popular crop? “Ogdensburg was a port city,” the historian said. “We had railroads coming in and out, we had ships coming in and out. This was a port town, so you could get whatever you wanted, so they were importing the tobacco.” But almost as suddenly as it came in, cigar making left in a puff of smoke. “The first thing that happened was World War I,” Madlin said. “We had machines turning out cigars much more quickly than an individual worker could do. The second thing was prohibition. Cigars were being sold in saloons, when prohibition comes, that no longer was the case. And then, of course, the Depression, and finally people’s tastes began to change. Instead of smoking cigars, they’re smoking cigarettes.” And with that, Ogdensburg’s cigar industry was snuffed out.
Copyright 2024 WWNY. All rights reserved.
Comments
Post a Comment